


Sin is crouching at your door

by thekissofbees



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: (Or less than Canon-Typical), Baseball, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, F/M, Homophobia, M/M, Racism, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-26
Updated: 2016-04-26
Packaged: 2018-06-04 16:55:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6666694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thekissofbees/pseuds/thekissofbees
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the main streets of downtown, there are the scattered remains of the U.S. of A.’s glorious, un-fucking-beatable army. Couple of abandoned tanks, and a few dogs and crows eating the corpses. Few of the corpses walking ‘round, with that characteristic slumping, unsteady walk of rotting flesh. Don’t seem to be much more dangerous than the living who used to inhabit this city—worse manners for certain, but not capable of any real damage unless they get you cornered.</p>
<p>‘Course, it’s tempting fate to think a thing like that, and if anyone should know how dangerous the living can be, it’s a police officer. But then, Rick’s always been an idealist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sin is crouching at your door

**Author's Note:**

> So I'm several years late with this, I realize. Oh well.

Rick tilts the brim of his hat down against the sun, riding into the city. The husk of Atlanta smolders in front of him, an endless retreat of empty cars in the outgoing lane. The horse is nervous underneath him, snorting and tossing his head like he’s got a swarm of flies biting at his ears. There don’t seem to be no _shelter_ here, in this sprawling town with the sun melting down the skyscrapers, but Rick keeps on riding anyhow.

In the main streets of downtown, there are the scattered remains of the U.S. of A.’s glorious, un-fucking-beatable army. Couple of abandoned tanks, and a few dogs and crows eating the corpses. Few of the corpses walking ‘round, with that characteristic slumping, unsteady walk of rotting flesh. Don’t seem to be much more dangerous than the living who used to inhabit this city—worse manners for certain, but not capable of any real damage unless they get you cornered.

‘Course, it’s tempting fate to think a thing like that, and if anyone should know how dangerous the living can be, it’s a police officer. But then, Rick’s always been an idealist.

Rick clucks at the horse, who is prancing in place as though he expects the earth to disintegrate under his feet at any minute. “C’mon boy. Haw, stay with me now.” The last remaining member of the Georgia cavalry turns the corner, and sees a field of souls drifting through the Asphodel Streets. Except for the dead silence and the decomposing bodies (organs. organs spilling out of bleeding crevices, putrefying skin and missing limbs and mouths lacking lips.), Rick can almost imagine the crowd as an ordinary group of the living wandering through Atlanta’s downtown.

They turn on him all at once, those clicking, slavering jaws working below their dead eyes. A plague of locusts, their teeth snapping together and a low hum emanating from their decaying vocal cords. To Rick, it sounds like burning, the hiss of an unappeasable hunger. The horse rears up. “Easy! Fuck.” The horse’s front legs come back down on the ground. Rick squeezes his thighs as tightly as he can. “C’mon now! Git, boy, git!” The horse is off like a shot, and Rick can see the whites of his eyes and the foam starting to form along the line of his mouth.

The tongues of that cold fire chase them down the street. They’re on the horse in a moment, ripping and tearing, and Rick watches the red drip down the streets of Atlanta. He is scrambling under the tank before he even thinks of doing so, staring at all those grasping hands and ghastly faces trying to have a taste of life. He puts the muzzle of his gun to his temple and offers up one final apology when, out of nowhere, a door opens up above his head.

***

“My boy say you a bank robber.”

Rick looks at Morgan, the way he looks so softly down at his son, those tiny lines by his eyes that can only come from years of smiling.

“Yeah, that’s me alright,” he says, poking at the bandage on his side and staring down at Fred and Cindy’s carpet. He glances at Duane, who is staring at him with eyes wide and curious. “Deadly as Dillinger,” he jokes, mouth twisting with the irony. “Naw. Sheriff’s deputy.”

He watches Morgan stiffen, turn inward towards his son. Sees that miniature shake of Morgan’s head, and the way Duane shifts back against the wall. A car alarm goes off, and they all startle.

***

Most of Rick’s memories of his daddy involve playing baseball in the backyard. Shane never did think much of baseball; thought the lack of action made it a sport for pussies (even then, the weight of Shane’s opinion was heavy), but Rick’s daddy explained that baseball was the thinking man’s sport.

Those first few treasured summers: his daddy coming home in his sports jacket, his face already flushed and sweaty, but stripping down to his stained white undershirt and playing in the yard with Rick until the lightning bugs started to crawl out of the woods. Both them wearing Braves caps, throwing until the ache in his palm was as familiar as his name in his daddy’s voice.

All those rituals to learn: the different ways to position the fingers for a four-seam and a two-seam, the angle of the arm for a nasty curve, how to spit into your hand without the ump seeing you. How to catch a pop fly, all the different way a grounder can bounce up at you. And the math of it, too, which base to throw to and how to tell what to pitch and when you should listen to your catcher’s signals and when you shouldn’t. Rick would listen, and nod and nod and try to memorize every word his daddy said. 

Then they’d go inside, pick up a game on the television set, and his daddy would gesture at the fuzzy players with his open beer. It was a religion, more than anything. The only church his daddy ever attended.

“Like that, Rick. Ya see what he’s doing there? Ya see that bastard there, look at that son ofa bitch!”

In those days, Rick lived and breathed for when his daddy got home from work. Would spend the morning listlessly wandering around the house until his mama kicked his ass outside, and then he’d tromp around in the woods with Shane until he could have the excuse of supper to go home and stare out the window, waiting for the sound of his daddy’s car to rumble up. He had to remind himself not to throw himself into his daddy’s arms, ‘cause he wasn’t a kid no more, but he still couldn’t keep himself from running to the door and waiting for his daddy to slap him on the back, in that violently affectionate way he had.

Years later, when his daddy’s arrival home just meant another night of listening to his parents shout, he would still practice throwing through an old tire hanging in the backyard, hoping against hope that his daddy might someday ask how his pitching was coming along.

(One morning, Lori will yell at Rick, not for the first time. “Speak, goddamn you! Why won’t you fucking _talk_ to me?”

Rick will try, but the only thing he’ll be able to think of is the day he threw sliders ‘til his arm gave out and he couldn’t even lift it, let alone throw. He was so proud, waiting for his daddy to come home so he could tell him about it, but his daddy glanced through him as if he was a ghost, and went straight up stairs, ignoring the dinner on the table. 

Rick will shrug at Lori, his face apologetic, and tell her that he doesn’t want to fight, that he doesn’t understand why she’s so angry.

She’ll cry, and later tell a friend that sometimes she wishes he would just hit her.)

***

“You fuckin’—” Shane shakes his head violently, like he can shake the idea out of his head. 

“Yeah? You got somethin’ you want to say, Shane? You got something you fucking want to tell me? Huh?”

“Don’t fuckin’ talk to me like that, ya piece of shit. I swear to God, I ain’t gonna be able to help what I do, if you fuckin’ keep talking to me that way.”

“Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do to me, Shane?” Shane shoves Rick. “Oh yeah, betcha feel like a real man now, don’t you. Fucking pushing me around, look how tough you are.”

“Shut up!” 

“Your daddy sure would be proud. Whatcha gonna do, Shane? Gonna shoot me?” 

“—you, you, you white trash son of a bitch!”

Rick has seen Shane with a broken nose before. Sat on the porch with him the morning after Shane’s daddy came home with a nasty hangover, eating cherry popsicles and watching Shane swear up a storm, blotting the blood mixed with sugar dripping down his face with a paper towel. Few years later, dragged Shane out of that bar, fists still swinging at nothing, and popped his nose back into place in the middle of the street. In the Academy too, hardly able to keep a straight face while Shane flirted with the little grey-haired nurse judgmentally bandaging him up. When Shane breathes at night, you can hear the rasping, like one of those pugilistic dogs with the smashed-in snouts.

Rick never broke Shane’s nose himself, but he’s mighty tempted to now. Wants to rearrange that lump of clay on Shane’s face, reform it how he likes. He clenches his fist, imagines the way it would feel—that first crunch of sloppily healed bone, and then the give of flesh and cartilage. 

Instead he grins, makes sure that the one-sided dimple is as a prominent as it can be. “Brother, it seems to me that if one of us is white trash, it’s you.” 

Shane’s got these big-ass hands, all knuckles and meaty palm and cracking joints. He’s got those hands loosely wrapped around Rick’s throat now, got him pressed up against a tree. Their bodies real close, Shane’s eyes wild.

“You can’t fuckin’ _say_ shit like that to me, you idiot! It’s like ya don’t have an ounce of fuckin’ self-preservation, I swear to God, man. You _makin’_ me do this, this ain’t me, it’s you. You a been causin’ it, making me like this! I’m not like this, you know I ain’t like this. I’m just tryin’ take care of everyone, tryin’ to do right by Lori and Carl and the baby. You know that’s all I’m tryin’ to do.”

Rick twists his head in Shane’s grasp, spits over his arm and onto the ground. “You always been like this. Ain’t nothing different ‘bout the way you are now, I was just too blind to see it then.”

“Fuck, don’t say shit like that, man. Why can’t ya just keep your mouth shut?”

“Get off me.”

Shane releases him; swaggers away and holds his hands up in the air like he’s surrendering. “Wasn’t gonna do nothing to you. No need to be a girl ‘bout it.”

Shane’s got his lips peeled up away from his teeth in that shit-eating smirk he does in place of a grin, and for a moment Rick imagines slamming his mouth into that smile, biting it off Shane’s face. He wants to see if he can taste Lori on those lips, wants to know what it would sound like for his teeth to crash against Shane’s. Wants to feel the crack of Shane’s nose under his fist and then lick the blood off his face.

He and Shane gonna destroy each other some day, it’s written in Rick’s skin same way that Atlanta on fire and the smack of the third strike against the catcher’s glove are. It ain’t ‘bout Lori nor the kids—it’s about the flesh he shares with his brother and the mark of Cain that he feels descending upon their heads. He feels like he should care more ‘bout their damnation, but this place about as close to Hell as you can get, anyhow. Part of Rick hopes that Shane will be the one to kill him first, for he don’t take lightly to never getting out of this place.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Genesis 4:7. (It's a story about the South, how can the title not be a Biblical allusion?)  
> Feel free to come talk to me on tumblr at thekissofbees.


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